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Look how stinking cute she is! Somehow she’s stayed the same age and I have aged exponentially.

I rolled out of bed this morning and tried to walk quietly on my way to the shower so I didn’t wake her up. I caught my left toe on a shoe I left on left on the floor, but I didn’t even notice that because that toe has been numb since my first back surgery in 2005 – The Hammer of Spinal Repair (Adrienne wrote that BTW). My right knee creaked as I walked, I had surgery on that in 2001, and I’ve had a bit of a limp in my left leg since I blew up my back a year ago and had to have a spinal fusion…

I trimmed my beard, partly to clip off the rampant gray hairs that have sprung up in the past year, and I had to squint a bit as I did it because it seems to take my eyes a lot longer to focus than they used to.

And then you have Adrienne somehow getting younger and better looking by the day.

Some of this is just science — I’m 6’6” and she’s 5’3 (if we are being generous), so according to this article, “Larry Bird will die young. Just ask him”, I will live to be 50 and she will live to be two hundred and forty-five. Some of it is really just that she’s too tough to age — I can’t even keep up with her anymore when we walk or hike. Some of it is the dark rituals… but I’m not allowed to talk about those.

Don’t tell anyone, but Adrienne has some gray hair too. The difference is that her’s are super cute and perfectly symmetrical and the kind of thing that people go to the salon to have done.

There isn’t anyone I’d rather asymmetrically grow old with.

Also she is hot.

Take a minute out of your busy day and wish Adrienne a happy Adrienne Day!

What is Adrienne Day?
I hate Valentine’s day. It is a cheesy, commercial mess of a holiday. I can’t stand it. Adrienne, on the other hand, I love. So, when we were dating and Valentine’s day was approaching I decided to take control over my own holiday destiny and I invented Adrienne Day. I arbitrarily chose February 9th and we have celebrated it ever since.

I lived in Venezuela from 94′ – 96′ and the Maracaibo sun burned a deep love of the place and the people right in to my soul.

I’m still regularly in touch with many people there, so it’s been absolutely heart breaking to watch the country implode and know so many people suffering.

Because he is my twin, it feels like Joe was able to suck memories and motifs right out of my brain even though he’s never been to Venezuela, and he wrote a song about the place that moved me to tears.

Your foot really will sink in to the asphalt in the maracaibo heat, and the enormous lake Maracaibo hosts a never ending lighting storm called catatumbo, which is a fitting metaphor…

Maracaibo

Crossing the street leaves tar on your feet
Not even the pavement can handle this heat
It's a push and a shove for the ones that you love
But the stores are all empty again
If you don't want to break, you're gonna have to bend
There's a lightning storm that never ends
You can't say what makes you stay
With the border less than an hour away
It bulges at the seams with all your hopes and dreams
But you can't bring yourself to leave
So if you don't want to break, your'e gonna have to bend
There's a lightning storm that never ends, it never ends
If you don't want to break, you're gonna have to bend
Because this lightning storm never ends, it never ends, will never end

(Joe wrote and played the song, and his preternaturally gifted daughter sang it. )

Adrienne and I were sitting on the couch the other night choosing a movie to watch and trying to get Reese to go to bed. I was obviously coming down with something because I had a fever and felt miserable. I NEVER get a fever. EVER.

Adrienne and I were joking back and forth and, even though I was legitimately miserable, I was having a great time too. Reese begged to stay up late and hang out with us because he was absolutely delighted with how much fun we have together.

I can’t blame him; we have really do have so much fun together.

(Even when I have an absolutely unprecedented fever that means I had the flu worse than anyone has ever had it in history and I was so very brave about it and barely complained at all.)

I ended up coughing my lungs out a few nights in a row and tried to fix it by soaking in a tub at 3am after taking my codeine cough medicine. In my sleep-deprived and syzurup-addled state I had the stereotypical silly-stoner moment of thinking I had a profound insight about the meaning of life and then was totally unable to remember it. I tried to dig back through my thoughts and recapture it, but besides, “God probably thinks everything we ask Him for is hilariously out of line” all I could come up with was “Spend your time with your favorite and your best.” Which, thanks codeine, I think is straight from the kids show Charlie and Lola, but is really not a half bad attempt at the meaning of life if you let it sit for a minute.

Adrienne is definitely my favorite and my best, and I’m never happier than when I’m spending my time with her.

Also she is hot.

Take a minute out of your busy day and wish Adrienne a happy Adrienne Day!

What is Adrienne Day?
I hate Valentine’s day. It is a cheesy, commercial mess of a holiday. I can’t stand it. Adrienne, on the other hand, I love. So, when we were dating and Valentine’s day was approaching I decided to take control over my own holiday destiny and I invented Adrienne Day. I arbitrarily chose February 9th and we have celebrated it ever since.

“Alternatively, according to Clayton Swansen, a dolphin handler who worked in the Navy program between 2003 and 2005, the marine mammals are equipped with a bite plate that holds a shackle that the dolphins can use to disable an intruder. “They just hit the person in the leg and it attaches around their leg and they can’t pull it off until it sends a float up,” Swansen told Business Insider.“

I was looking back though my photos to find a good picture for Adrienne Day and ended up getting lost browsing through my instagram feed and smiling at all the adventures we had this past year. We had a couple big trips and lots of little hikes and family walks and sledding and tubing, and even just hanging out in the kitchen and cooking new things together. Between my being a Scoutmaster and a few work trips there were also a several adventures that Adrienne didn’t get to join that would have been SO much better if she were there.

I love how Adrienne is always up for an adventure and that’s she’s such good company when we are on one. She’s fun and funny and smart and curious and everything is better with her around.

Also she is hot.

Take a minute out of your busy day and wish Adrienne a happy Adrienne Day!

What is Adrienne Day?
I hate Valentine’s day. It is a cheesy, commercial mess of a holiday. I can’t stand it. Adrienne, on the other hand, I love. So, when we were dating and Valentine’s day was approaching I decided to take control over my own holiday destiny and I invented Adrienne Day. I arbitrarily chose February 9th and we have celebrated it ever since.

Swedish salty licorice is the worst candy I’ve ever had by a factor of 10. It tastes like hospital disinfectant, gunpowder, and the tears of chimney sweeps.

It’s flavored with ammonium chloride. Read this and tell me if this is a food stuff:

“The mineral is commonly formed on burning coal dumps, due to condensation of coal-derived gases. It is also found around some types of volcanic vents. It is used as a flavouring agent in some types of liquorice. It is the product from the reaction of hydrochloric acid and ammonia.”

I’m sure it’s an acquired taste, but one that must be acquired the same way the Manchurian candidate acquired his love of communism, or Alex his distaste for ultra-violence.

If I ever had to debate against Nordic Democratic Socialism I would just point to this candy and win.

No, we aren’t having another kid! This is just one of my very favorite pictures of us even though it is super grainy and not terribly flattering. I was thinking about all the things I love about Adrienne and this moment popped into my head. I feel like this picture is REALLY a picture of us. It captured who we are so well that I freaked out and destroyed my iPhone so it would release our souls.
We were in the waiting room, waiting for what was almost certainly going to be an unwanted C-section to top off a pregnancy that had already been fraught. We were a little nervous and stressed, but we were together and we were laughing and we were ready to take on anything.

Sometimes I feel like we’ve had more than our fair share of practice with hard things in life, but the practice has paid off. When the going gets tough the Penrods will form Voltron and punch the Going right in the throat.

(If we were really Voltron we would have learned from the cartoon, and we would just immediately form the Blazing Sword and use it. It always took cartoon Voltron 45 min to figure out that they just needed to form the sword and the battle would be instantly over, just like happend the last 100 times)

This is pretty much exactly what we look like when dealing with tough situations, except Adrienne is hot.

Take a minute out of your busy day and wish Adrienne a happy Adrienne Day!

What is Adrienne Day?
I hate Valentine’s day. It is a cheesy, commercial mess of a holiday. I can’t stand it. Adrienne, on the other hand, I love. So, when we were dating and Valentine’s day was approaching I decided to take control over my own holiday destiny and I invented Adrienne Day. I arbitrarily chose February 9th and we have been celebrating it ever since.

The summer before Adrienne and I got engaged I was working coaching volleyball camps. I would drive or fly out to some crazy little town and spend most of the week coaching high school girls and then come home on the weekends. I ended up in some interesting places, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico being a memorable one for the name alone.

When I was in Provo I spent every minute with Adrienne. When I was at a camp I spent every non-coaching minute thinking about Adrienne. Not just thinking about hanging out with her, but thinking about spending the rest of my life with her.

When we went to these camps we usually staying in the home of a parent of someone on the team, and in Truth or Consequences I can clearly remember excusing myself one evening to go for a walk. Their home backed up into some fairly wide open desert, and I walked around in the moonlight, trying not to step on cactus, and trying to decide if I was going to ask Adrienne to marry me.

It’s funny to think back on that and try to imagine what my thought process could have possibly been. What did I know about anything? I can’t believe I had to trust that idiot kid with my future! I would barely trust Young Josh to decide what shirt to wear!

And yet, somehow, that guy made an amazing decision.

You are kind of an idiot Young Josh, but you did good on this one. You should know that it all works out WAY better than you could have imagined. You couldn’t have chosen a better wife. You love being married to Adrienne. Just tonight you were reading through your journal and smiling at how many times you wrote something about just spending time with Adrienne doing even boring stuff like chores, and how often those entries ended with “A really nice day!”

You’ve had more than your fair sure of really nice days, and you owe an awful lot of that to marrying Adrienne. You did good Josh.

Also, she is still hot.

PS – go to class you idiot!

Take a minute out of your busy day and wish Adrienne a happy Adrienne Day!

What is Adrienne Day?

I hate Valentine’s day. It is a cheesy, commercial mess of a holiday. I can’t stand it. Adrienne, however, I love. So, when we were dating and Valentine’s day was approaching I decided to take control over my holiday destiny and I invented Adrienne Day. I arbitrarily chose February 9th and we have celebrated it ever since.

When email first really became a thing I would constantly get mass-forwarded emails. Do you remember those? Bill Gates wanted so badly to give me a ton of money if I would just help him track emails by forwarding them

“My name is Bill Gates. I have just written up an email-tracing program that traces everyone to whom this message is forwarded to. I am experimenting with this and I need your help. Forward this to everyone you know, and if it reaches 1,000 people, everyone on the list will receive $1,000 at my expense. Enjoy. Your friend, Bill Gates.”

I still remember a friend of a friend of a friend being getting mad at me when I sent a link showing that tampons did not, in fact, contain asbestos. Goofy political conspiracies, inspiring but not true at all stories… all sorts of things that could be disproved with a little common sense and a quick google search.

Eventually people matured enough that they stopped sending those out. Or maybe they all just got mad at me for checking Snopes and replying to their dumb email in 3 seconds and they just didn’t include me on future forwards. Luckily, whenever I get nostalgic for those days I can just go to Facebook and look at my stream.

OK, it’s not really Adrienne Day, but I’m going to tweak the date on this and pretend that it is. On Adrienne day I was building snow caves with Reese and the Boy Scouts and trying to make sure none of them froze to death on our winter campout. Then I came home and caught up on the sleep I didn’t get that night.

Adrienne is taking a well-deserved nap now. Really, she deserves about a month straight of them. We decided in advance, since we knew this campout was coming, to post-pone Adrienne Day. The fact that Adrienne and pretty much everyone in the house was sick made that an even easier decision. I’m excited for postponed Adrienne Day though, I have some fun things planned for her.

It’s so easy to write nice things about Adrienne. She loves everyone (and if she thinks you are lame, you should take a long hard look at yourself, because that means you are). Adrienne is sweet and nice and kind. She just absolutely IS those things. But don’t underestimate her toughness.

I love those Man vs Wild kind of survival shows and I sometimes make Adrienne watch them with me. She always says things like, “He is going to eat that snake raw and drink his own urine?! I would just die instead. There is no way I would do that!” That’s totally a lie. When the going gets tough Adrienne is actually unstoppable. I’ve seen her in the past month wracked with the flu, with pink eye caught from our germ-factory elementary school kids, eyes swollen mostly shut, and on not nearly enough sleep night after night, just go about her business dealing with whatever needs to be dealt with. She is no martyr about it, she is just tough and she is going to take care of her family no matter what.

She hasn’t worn makeup in a month, trying to avoid pink eye again, but even without makeup and with swollen eyes she is hot.

Take a minute out of your busy day and wish Adrienne a happy Adrienne Day!

Previous Adrienne Days

What is Adrienne Day?

I hate Valentine’s day. It is a cheesy, commercial mess of a holiday. I can’t stand it. Adrienne, on the other hand, I love. So, when we were dating and Valentine’s day was approaching I decided to take control over my own holiday destiny and I invented Adrienne Day. I arbitrarily chose February 9th and we have been celebrating it ever since.

Think about it. We have a baby coming any day now and we are going to bring him home from the hospital and let him live in our home from now on without knowing anything about him at all! Who is this guy? He could be a total jerk and we are just going to let him move in with us?

This is a huge market. Thousands of stranger babies are born every day. Wouldn’t you sleep better knowing a little more about that little mystery man’s background?

I just choked to death on a cherry coke and coughed it all over my office like a custom-built Cherry Coke in-office sprinkler system. It looks like I murdered an Elf in here (everyone knows they bleed cherry coke).

It’s no secret that I really, really, really like Adrienne. But here is a secret; I like her even more on our fifteenth Adrienne Day then I did on the first. That sounds kind of awful doesn’t it? But it’s true. That takes nothing away from how much I liked her before, I used to like her a ten. It’s just that, here we are, both with a little gray in our hair (her’s is cute), and I’ve found out this Like goes to eleven.

I couldn’t be happier/luckier/more blessed to be married to her.

Also, she is hot.

Take a minute out of your busy day and wish Adrienne a happy Adrienne Day with a comment!

Previous Adrienne Days

What is Adrienne Day?

I hate Valentine’s day. It is a cheesy, commercial mess of a holiday. I can’t stand it. Adrienne, on the other hand, I love. So, when we were dating and Valentine’s day was approaching I decided to take control over my own holiday destiny and I invented Adrienne Day. I arbitrarily chose February 9th and we have been celebrating it ever since.